In a way, I’m relieved, because I’ve nowhere left to run.
Chapter 26
“But who’d want to kill him? He was a petty thief, not Tony Soprano.”
There’s an edge to my voice. Shug was small-fry. He was someone who found it easier drifting his way through life on the rob instead of doing a decent day’s work. He got off on the thrill of it all. He wasn’t the kind of cold, calculating criminal who made enemies.
Tommy doesn’t so much as blink. “It’s better to think in terms of why and not who. Anybody will kill anybody if the price is right.”
“Who put a price on his head, then?”
Tommy looks me straight in the eye. “Shug was looking after a gun for someone. The last time he was busted for burglary, he didn’t have time to put it somewhere safe, so he managed to smuggle out a message to your parents asking them to dispose of it.”
“My parents…” I’m choking on the words. “They hid a gun for Shug?”
I can’t believe they’d do that. Not my mum and dad, who were as law-abiding as they come. When they got the wrong change at the store, they’d always pipe up and hand it back.
“Afraid so. That’s what signed their death warrant. Who else would a lad in trouble go to but his mammy and daddy?”
“How do you know about the gun?” I fire out the question, meeting him with a stone-cold, hard stare, giving him no time to think.
“Shug confided in me. He knew I wouldn’t tell anyone because of client confidentiality and all that.”
“Why go to so much trouble for one gun?”
From what I’d heard there were plenty of guns in Glasgow. Why was this one so damn special?
“This one had been used,” says Tommy.” Probably in a series of armed robberies. That’s what they do, you know. Get some patsy to stash the gun in payment for a debt or in exchange for some favor.”
“How do you know all this? Are you a cop?”
I’m joking—no cop I’ve heard of would clock someone over the head with a crowbar—but for a brief second, he looks worried.
“Me? Nah, don’t be daft.”
My head’s spinning. If what he’s saying is true, Shug was responsible for Mum and Dad’s deaths, for my ordeal. He’d brought hell to our door.
“What now?” I’ve got to be practical. Yates will come after me and so will his boss, because they’ll think I have the gun. There’s no way he’ll call off the dogs; not when he has so much to lose.
Tommy meets my eyes with a piercing gaze of his own. “We go after the man who owned the gun. The man who ordered his two thugs to do whatever was necessary to get it back. He’s called Sandy McNab.”
Sandy McNab? I know that name. He’s what we call “a local businessman,” but in his case, the term should always have been in quotation marks because that’s how he’d been described by his lawyers the few times he’d landed in court charged with money laundering. Each time he’d been cleared, but there’d been talk of jury tampering and brown paper bags under tables.
Tommy adds, “Unless McNab’s found face down in the River Clyde, we should stick together because he will come after you. You’re a loose end, and he seldom leaves loose ends.” He pauses to let his words sink in. “Do you know that woman in the witness protection program who was found drowned in her bath, despite having police protection?”
I do. It’d been all over the papers with suggestions as to why she’d been killed.
“The rumors are she was ratting on McNab. She saw some dodgy business deal going down, and she was going to spill.”
Damn. This was worse than I thought.
“We can stay at my place,” Tommy says. “They don’t know about me. Yet. You’ll be safe there.”
My head feels like it’s about to explode. This is a nightmare. But it’s my nightmare.
“You’ve done your bit. You can just drop me off somewhere. You don’t have to be any more involved that you already are.”
Even after all that I’ve heard, I can’t expect him to put his neck on the line for me. If he leaves now, McNab might never find out he was the one who took out two of his men and saved me.
“Sick of me already?” The car’s stopped at the traffic lights, and Tommy’s smiling. He’s not taking me seriously.
“No,” I snap. How can I have a sense of humor after what he’s just told me? “I don’t want to drag you into my business, that’s all.”
Tommy fixes me with an intense stare. “I’m already in your business.” He pauses to let his words sink in. “Now, do I drop you at a bus stop, or do you want to stay at my place where no one will find you?”
Arguing with him is pointless, so I don’t bother. I’m physically and emotionally drained, like a cloth someone’s used many times to wipe a counter with and wrung out. I need sleep and my stomach’s rumbling away, old-man style. I can’t remember the last time I ate.
“Okay,” I say, “I can sleep on the couch.”
He grins. “That’s disappointing. We could have shared my bed. I have mirrors on my ceilings, you know. Think of all the fun we could have.”
I throw back my head and chuckle. “Yeah, right.”
It feels good to laugh, because I haven’t laughed in so long.
For the rest of the journey, we travel in silence.
Tommy’s apartment is the epitome of a bachelor pad. There are two gaming chairs in the living room, a huge beanbag, a plasma telly the size of a cinema screen, and a décor designers would describe as “minimalistic” but I’d call impersonal. It proved he was single, because no woman would live in a place like this.
There was a drinks cooler nestling in the armrest of one of the gaming chairs, and he delves inside, grabs a bottle of Becks, and asks me if I want one. I shake my head. I need to stay alert, to concentrate.
Five minutes later, he’s made me some hot chocolate and toast, and I’m curled up in a chair, wrapped in a duvet and watching Tom & Jerry cartoons. For the first time in a long time, I feel safe and I want to sleep. But there are things I need to know.
“Tommy, who are you?”
He puts on a goofy grin. “I’m the Scottish Jack Bauer. Jock Bauer’s the name.” He says it in a Sean Connery voice.
“Very funny. But who are you really? Why did you help me and not just contact the police? You could have been killed.”
A wry grin lights up his face. “I’m the guy who saw a photo of someone’s sister and thought I’d like to meet that girl.”
He leans across and presses his lips to mine, and I don’t resist. As our tongues entwine and I inhale his musky scent, I have an urge to run my fingers through his hair. When his hand reaches under my top and caresses my breast, I whimper. It feels so good that I don’t even warn him about my scars.
His lips tickle my ear. “Let’s go to bed.”
He holds out his hand and I take it.
Afterwards, we lie in a tangle of limbs, our bodies exhausted. He’s drifting off and I am too when a thought makes its way inside my head and stays there like a bullet in the brain.
“What drugs was Shug on?”
A dozy smile from Tommy. “Eh?”
“You said Shug was on a methadone program. Right? That means he was injecting heroin.”
Tommy eases himself up on an elbow. “Aye, that’s right.”
He’s lying.
I scramble out of bed, pulling on my clothes.
“You’re not Shug’s pal, are you? So why have you been helping me?”
Tommy props himself up on a pillow and watches me. “Smart girl, I knew you’d catch on.”
An image of Shug when he was a wee boy getting an injection from the doctor, screaming and trying to wriggle out of Mum’s arms, comes into my head. Even the promise of a comic from Woolworths didn’t calm him down.
Tommy pulls himself up to get out of bed. Even through my anger, I can’t help but appreciate the way his torso ripples when he moves.
“We need to talk about this, sweetheart.”
>
But I’m not listening.
“Shug would never inject heroin. He was terrified of needles.”
That’s the point where I swing the baseball bat I found under the bed at him. He catches sight of it but can’t get out the way in time. There’s a satisfying ding as metal makes contact with skull and he falls back onto the bed.
Wasting no time, I handcuff him to the bedpost with some cuffs he conveniently left in the drawer.
After making some more coffee to stop myself from shivering, I sit and wait for him to regain consciousness.
There’s a few questions I need to ask.
Chapter 27
“Fuck. My head. Did you have to hit me so hard?”
Tommy doesn’t look happy, but I wouldn’t expect him to after the way I’d hit him. Whilst he’s been out, I’ve been waiting for him to wake up, wanting to be the first thing he sees.
“Sorry,” I say, sounding as unapologetic as anyone can be, because I’m far from sorry. The bastard lied to me.
Tommy gazes up at me with a lopsided grin on his face as if this is all a game. “If you fancied some S&M, you only had to say.”
“You lied to me. You didn’t know Shug at all.” He won’t get a reaction from me. “Who are you?”
“I was about to explain that when you clobbered me one.”
He looks at me as though he’s still expecting an apology, but I raise my eyebrows upward. “I’m listening.”
“My name is Tommy. I didn’t lie about that.”
“Whoop-de-bloody-do. Well, thanks for that nugget of truth. I’m so glad it wasn’t all make-believe.”
“My name’s Tommy McIntyre. I was in the army, first in the Royal Engineers then as a training instructor.”
Hence the fit body.
“I didn’t know Shug, but I knew about him. Couldn’t stop nicking things from what I hear. But not a bad guy.”
My shoulders hunch. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
“But he got greedy. Started nicking stuff out of fancy houses. Stores weren’t enough for him anymore. One of the houses he targeted belonged to a woman called Natalie Hunter…”
My face wrinkles in confusion. He’s saying that name as though I should know it.
“She used to be a high-class call girl. Wrote a book about it, and it was serialized in all the papers.”
Nope, still doesn’t ring a bell.
“Anyway, she’s Sandy McNab’s mistress. Has been for years. He set her up as a lady of leisure. She lives in a mansion set in acres of grounds. It has its own stables and heart-shaped swimming pool. No neighbors for miles.”
I cut in. “Thanks for the estate agent’s report. Can you get to the point?”
Tommy raises an eyebrow. “Like you did with me earlier, Nancy?” My fuck-you glare is greeted with a grin.
I lift up the bat, giving it a wee swing. “Keep talking and stop leering, or I’ll belt you over the head again.”
He looks like a dog about to have a good meal. “I love it when you talk dirty.”
I lean over the bed and pull the cover over his naked body. “And cover yourself up.”
Can’t have him distracting me with that body. The body that not so long ago I was exploring every part of, tasting and gaining pleasure from.
He clears his throat. “Your brother and a pal targeted the house when Natalie was away on holiday. They grabbed money and jewelry. Then they did something really stupid. They found a gun stashed in a safe box under the bed, and Shug pocketed it. He should have left it well alone, but he smelt a big payday. One that he maybe reckoned would set him up for life. So he blackmailed Natalie. Told her he wanted twenty grand or he’d give it to the police.”
My mouth’s gone dry. I could tell where this was heading, but I need to hear it.
“She told McNab, but he couldn’t touch Shug. Not until he found out where he’d put the gun. With Shug in prison after he got caught breaking into another house and his accomplice in the robbery dead of a suspected overdose, he knew someone had to be hiding the gun for Shug. After ruling out some more obvious choices amongst the criminal fraternity, he thought of your parents. Who better to hide a gun than two law-abiding senior citizens who’d told everyone they’d washed their hands of their boy?”
It all started to make sense. Why my parents were targeted. Why they killed Shug.
Sinking back in the chair next to the bed, I gaze over at Tommy, tracing every line of his face and studying his body language, looking for any indication that he was lying. There’s none, and my gut feeling is that he’s telling me the truth.
But there’s one thing I don’t get, that doesn’t make any sense to me.
“If you don’t know Shug, why are you involved in all this? Why didn’t you let them kill me? None of this is anything to do with you.”
Tommy’s eyes have lost their sparkle. “This has everything to do with me. You see, that gun Shug took, that was used to kill my brother. He was an undercover cop, placed in McNab’s organization. But McNab got suspicious and he shot him with that gun.”
He looks down at the handcuffs. “Christ, Nancy. If we’re going to do this again, we’ll need bigger cuffs.”
“Aw, shut up,” I snap. “Or I’ll put you in the trunk of a car so you can experience what I did.”
As I’m unlocking the cuffs, I expect another joke, but Tommy’s eyes aren’t quite meeting mine.
“Whilst we’re being honest, there’s something else I need to tell you.” Tommy’s jaw clenches. “I was there that night.”
Chapter 28
“What?”
So much for getting all the lies out the way. But this…
How would he know to find me there? Was he involved?
My hands are shaking. Should I have kept him tied up or bludgeoned him to death with the bat to save myself?
“I don’t understand how you could have been.” I pause to try and slow down my breathing. “I genuinely don’t.”
He can’t look at me as he speaks. “I figured out where the pair were headed when I saw them leave McNab’s unofficial HQ. Some bar he owns. When I got to your parents’ house, they’d left. You were lying on the floor, half-dead. I phoned an ambulance.”
Now I knew he was lying.
“But I remember getting to the phone.” And the police told me there’d been an emergency call from my phone. They assumed it was from me although the person had said nothing and hung up.
I study him for any sign of deceit. This time, he doesn’t look away, he soaks in my gaze. Either he’s an expert liar or he’s finally telling the truth.
“You passed out before you could dial.”
“And you left me there? You didn’t even try to help me?”
“You’d already lost so much blood. I thought you were dead. Besides, the police couldn’t find me there. Sandy McNab would have found out. Come after me. There’s cops on his payroll, snitches for hire. One of them gave up my brother. They must have. Who else would have known he was an undercover? They don’t exactly share these things around the station.”
“You’re un-fucking-believable,” I roar, reaching for the bat because I want to hit him again.
How could I have trusted someone who left me to die? They told me I was lucky to survive because I’d lost so much blood. Tommy could have helped staunch the flow before the medics arrived.
“What would you have done?”
His words follow me as I stomp out the room and head for the bathroom where I slam the door, lock it, and slump to the floor. I need time to think.
After what seems like an eternity of sitting on the floor, I’ve got to admit that I’d have done the same as Tommy.
Chapter 29
As the city lights lit up his kingdom, Alexander McNab gazed down from his penthouse suite on the nineteenth floor of Clyde Valley Mansions and congratulated himself on a job well done. Not bad for a wee scrapper from Govan.
Using all his ingenuity and cunning, he’d pulled himself up
by his fraying bootstraps, and now wee Sandy was a man of means and a respected pillar of the community to boot, thanks to the PR firm he’d hired and his many charitable works.
If he’d learnt anything along the way, it was that money could buy you respectability, no matter how you’d come by that money. Last night, he’d been at a benefit dinner to raise funds for a series of boxing gyms throughout the city, aimed at keeping young boys out of trouble. He’d won the biggest prize of all when he’d bid over forty grand for a cushy executive box at the next Scotland international rugby match at Murrayfield. To a man, everybody had applauded his generosity. Now if that’s wasn’t respectability, then what was?
Three loud raps on the door interrupted his train of thought. He’d dispensed with his butler for the night, so he was forced to answer the door himself, which annoyed him—he didn’t get to where he was today so he’d still end up answering his own door. That was the butler’s job.
He knew the caller was McGregor, his head of security, because nobody else was allowed on this floor—including his wife. She didn’t even know he owned this place, and he did his utmost to keep it that way. If the soppy cow ever got around to divorcing him, he wanted to make sure all his assets were hidden, well away from vultures masquerading as lawyers.
He barked, “Come in,” and the sturdy frame of McGregor appeared, his face as repugnant as ever thanks to the blade someone had dragged across one of his cheeks, narrowly missing one of his bug eyes that always looked like the eyelids had been propped up by invisible matchsticks.
He stood there, a big lummox, waiting for McNab to tell him he could talk.
McNab let him wait and poured himself a dram. “Get on with it, Jim, I’ve got some Glenmorangie to drink.”
McGregor’s voice was pure baritone. “It’s the girl, boss. She got away. Left Shaun and Ritchie with two sore heads. Shaun says the bird had some help.”
Hell To Pay (Crime Files Book 1) Page 9